1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an analytical method using chemical analytical slides used for the determination of various components in a body fluid such as blood or urine.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, in the clinical assay field, the advantages of dry analysis in simplicity and rapidity have been appreciated, and this method has widely been utilized. In the dry analysis, a liquid sample such as blood is spotted on a chemical analytical slide containing the reagents reacting with the object component such as glucose or urea nitrogen of the sample to produce color change such as coloring or discoloring, and the content of the object component is colorimetrically determined.
The dry analysis is usually carried out by using an automatic analyzer in order to secure accurate measurement and simplicity. In the analyzer, usually chemical analytical slides are arranged in a cartridge, and the cartridge is loaded in the cartridge loading part. The loaded chemical analytical slides are intermittently delivered one by one to the spotting part, and a liquid sample is spotted on each chemical analytical slide by a pipette. The slide is then transferred to an incubator, and warmed therein to proceed coloring reaction. Then, the color produced in each chemical analytical slide is optically measured at the photometric part to determine respective analytical subjects.
Meanwhile, there are various chemical analytical slides such as for determining glucose, urea nitrogen, hemoglobin and uric acid. Since several components of a sample are analyzed usually at once, various chemical analytical slides are combined for each sample according to its analytical items, and stacked in a prescribed order. For example, when glucose and urea nitrogen in sample I and glucose, urea nitrogen and total protein in sample II were measured, respective chemical analytical slides were arranged in the cartridge in the order of chemical analytical slide for glucose, the slide for urea nitrogen, the slide for glucose, the slide for urea nitrogen and the slide for total protein from the bottom. The changing of the sample was carried out by the worker handling the sample when the worker judged the new group of incoming slides by visual observation.
In such a method, however, the changing of the samples was often done in error to resulting in a serious problem that the analytical result of a different person was used for diagnosis of disease and the like. Moreover, since the worker had to judge respective chemical analytical slides one by one by visual observation before spotting the next sample, the system was complicated and its efficiency was low.